Does Cox artificially favor Speed-Tests? Real-World speeds slower than SpeedTest results.
I am on the Internet Preferred 150 plan, and in the last few months I've been having issues with my transfer speeds. Based on my plan, I should be getting 150 Mbps down / 10 Mbps up, and results from speedtest.com or fast.com always show my connection meeting or exceeding those transfer rates with speeds around 175 down and 10.5 up on average.
The problem is that these speeds are not holding up under sustained real-world loads, particularly on the Upstream side. I operate a Plex Media Server in my home and routinely stream from it throughout the day. In the past I was able to reliably stream at 8 Mbps, but in the last couple of months I have had severe buffering issues and had to bump down to 4 Mbps or less to get a stable stream. I have backed this up with a series of iperf3 tests, all of which show an initial transfer speed of 10 Mbps, which almost immediately drops to 4-4.5 Mbps after about a second of testing. Regular large transfers to other cloud storage services tell a similar story.
For the record, I disconnected my router and did a wired test with my laptop connected directly to the modem, which did show an overall increase to 5-5.5 Mbps in iPerf3, but that is still well below the service I pay for. Unless there is a problem with my modem (it has not given me any noteworthy trouble to date), I can't think of any hardware bottlenecks on my end that would limit my speeds, so it really feels like Cox is under-delivering my internet service and masking it by prioritizing speed test traffic.